1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to power supply methods to memory cards, and printing apparatuses.
2. Related Art
As apparatuses including a slot for a memory card, for example, there are printing apparatuses that acquire information of an image by directly inserting a memory card stored with information of an image taken by a digital camera and the like into a slot provided in the apparatus, when printing the image taken by the digital camera and the like. At present, a plurality of types of memory cards that have different shapes and positions of a terminal and the like to each other are commercially available. Therefore, the slot provided in the printing apparatus needs to be provided corresponding to a plurality of the types of memory cards. At this time, if the slot is individually provided for each type of card, the space that will be occupied by the slots in the printing apparatus becomes large. Therefore, there is proposed a compound connector for a memory card, that can obtain information from a plurality of the memory cards with one slot. Such a compound connector is provided with a terminal on the connector side, that corresponds to each memory card, and that is in accordance with the positions of the terminals of the respective memory cards so as to contact the terminal of the memory card that has been installed (refer to JP-A-2004-311416, for example).
However, with the aforementioned compound connector, when a certain type of memory card is inserted, the connector-side terminal provided in the position that corresponds to a different type of memory card may contact an exterior portion of the memory card that has been inserted. In such a case, when a conductive member is used for the exterior portion of the memory card, if the type of the inserted memory card is wrongly detected, and power is supplied to the memory card of a type that has been wrongly detected, there is a possibility that a power supply and GND (ground) may develop a short-circuit. Further, even if the surface of the conductive member is coated, the conductive member may be exposed as the coating comes off due to insertion and removal of the memory card. Thus, there is the possibility that the type of memory card is wrongly detected, and a power supply and GND (ground) become short-circuit. In the case where such a compound connector is provided to a printing apparatus, there was a problem of a possibility that the power supply of the printing apparatus is turned off by inserting the memory card.